darthcamaro writes: Mark Shuttleworth has taken a lot of heat for Ubuntu's decision to use Unity, to move away from Wayland and about its stance on the community distros like Kubuntu. In a new video interview Shuttleworth shoot back claiming no matter what he does people will always find fault due to...'competitive pressures.'

"What's genuinely difficult is that both I and a bunch of people that help make choices, genuinely care about what other people think," Shuttleworth said. "We go through a lot of trouble to accommodate other folks."

MatthewVD writes: "Bioprinting startup Modern Meadows is coming forward with its plans to master in vitro leather production in the next five years. The news follows the August announcement that Peter Thiel's Breakout Labs revolving fund had given the startup a grant. Modern Meadows' plans for 3D printed meat will probably have to wait for a few years, notably because a majority of people wouldn't want to eat cultured meat. Printed leather, on the other hand, would be welcomed by animal activists and skin is structurally simpler than meat."

zacharye writes: Samsung has accused Apple of calling expert witnesses that exhibit “slavish adoration” to the company during an ongoing patent trial between the two consumer electronics giants. As noted by patent expert Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents, court documents filed by Samsung in California seek to exclude testimony made by a number of Apple’s expert witnesses on the grounds that they were biased...

CowboyRobot writes: "This month is the 60th anniversary of magnetic tape as a data storage medium, and many companies (most of which did not exist when IBM developed the first tape drive) are realizing that the main complaints about tape are no longer relevant."The three biggest complaints about tape — that data is hard to find, might then be hard to read, and the media is generally unreliable — no longer hold water. The vendors emphasize that tape has become much easier to manage and use via automated health- and data-integrity verification tools. Thanks to file systems such as LTFS, tapes can look and act like enormous USB drives. Most surprising is the revelation that the raw bit error rate of tape is orders of magnitude better than that of most disk drives.""

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Cats are similar in anatomy to the other felids, with strong, flexible bodies, quick reflexes, sharp retractable claws, and teeth adapted to killing small prey. As crepuscular predators, cats use their acute hearing and ability to see in near darkness to locate prey. Not only can cats hear sounds too faint for human ears, they can also hear sounds higher in frequency than humans can perceive. The usual prey of cats (particularly rodents such as mice) make high frequency noises, so being able to pinpoint these faint high-pitched sounds gave cats' ancestors an evolutionary advantage.[8] Cats also have a much better sense of smell than humans.